John Hughes Bennett: a Catalogue of Some Surviving Artefacts

Proc R Coll Physicians Edinb 1997;27:000-000 JOHN HUGHES BENNETT: A CATALOGUE OF SOME SURVIVING ARTEFACTS Alison D. Morrison-Low, Royal Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1JF. A number of items connected with John Hughes Bennett have been preserved in his old department within the University of Edinburgh, now the Department of Physiology. In 1981, through the initiative of Professor William E. Watson, these were transferred into the care of the National Museums of Scotland, where they have been on display in the ‘Instruments of Science’ gallery. Some of the more important material, together with a number of items which help to provide a context for Bennett’s work, were gathered together to form a display at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh to coincide with the John Hughes Bennett anniversary meeting in September 1995, organized by the Leukaemia Research Fund. John Hughes Bennett (1812-1875) became a medical student at the University of Edinburgh in 1833. After a brilliant undergraduate career he obtained his MD in 1837 and spent the next four years on the mainland of Europe in postgraduate study. At this time, British medical teaching was still conservative and in many respects perhaps lagged behind continental practice. Whilst in Paris he attended Alfred Donné’s pioneering course on medical microscopy, which encouraged Bennett to start a similar lecture series on his return to Edinburgh in 1841, the first course on the systematic use of the microscope for medical students of any British university. The advertisement (Catalogue No. 1) (Fig 1) survives from his second term of extra- mural instruction. Bennett believed that every medical practitioner should possess a microscope, including students, and his writings promoted those instruments made for the student market by prominent continental makers such as Georges Oberhaeuser of Paris (Catalogue No. 2), which were sturdy and relatively inexpensive. He stressed the instrument’s value in clinical diagnosis. His own discovery and description of a disease of the blood in 1845, now known as leukaemia, was based on careful microscopy. Bennett especially recommended a portable microscope (Catalogue No. 3) (Fig 2) which he found ‘exceedingly convenient in visiting patients’, in the London and Edinburgh Monthly Journal of Medical Science, a periodical he both owned and edited. This microscope was Bennett’s own, designed by a French doctor friend of his, and made by the Parisian optician Johann Brunner. In his influential textbooks and lectures, Bennett recommended the portability and optical superiority of the microscopes made by continental instrument makers against the weight and expense of those made by English opticians. However, in 1848, the year he became professor of the Institutes of Medicine at Edinburgh, he ordered a microscope from the pre- eminent London maker Andrew Ross, for which the bill survives (Catalogue No. 4) (Fig 3) , although the instrument itself (Catalogue No.5) (Fig 4) is now incomplete. A slightly later microscope, made by Nachet of Paris, shows Bennett’s concern with student appreciation of microscopy (Catalogue No.6) (Fig 5): an instructor and two students can view the same specimen simultaneously. By the end of Bennett’s teaching career in 1874 he had overcome much of his earlier hostility to English- made microscopes: the class certificate (Catalogue No.7) (Fig 6) shows two 1 2 ALISON D. MORRISON-LOW continental instruments in the background, while the putti concentrate their attention on a microscope made by James Smith of London. Bennett’s interest in the medical use of the saccharimeter provides a good example of his approach to new instrumentation of the mid-nineteenth century: this instrument is a form of polarimeter used to examine sugars in solution using optical polarization effects. In the earliest forms of the polarimeter, developed from Etienne Malus’ discovery of polarization by reflection in 1808, the polarizer was usually a single sheet of black glass, and the analyzer a similar glass plate or a simple rhomb of Iceland spar. This later example (Catalogue No.8) by Deleuil of Paris uses a polarizer of this type. The Scotsman Sir David Brewster and the Frenchman Jean Baptist Biot both continued work in this area. Brewster discovered the law, which bears his name, in investigations which laid the basis for the science of optical crystallography, while Biot discovered that several naturally-occurring compounds, such as sugar, can rotate the plane of polarized light. The instrumentation which developed from this work on both sides of the Channel was greatly helped by the invention of the Nicol prism in 1827, by William Nicol, an Edinburgh teacher and amateur geologist (Catalogue No.9). Both the saccharimeter (Catalogue No.10) and the polarimeter (Catalogue No.11) were developed into more useful and versatile instruments, which could operate with white light rather than being restricted to monochromatic light sources. The saccharimeter’s widest use was in breweries for process and quality control and also in the food industry, to check for adulteration and to regulate the duty levied on sugar. In medicine, the instrument was used in the analysis of sugar levels in diabetic urine, then known as one of the principal indicators of diabetes. John Hughes Bennett suffered from this disease himself from about 1865. Two examples of saccharimeters (Catalogue Nos.12 and 13) (Fig 7) from Bennett’s Edinburgh department survive. They were made by the Parisian firm of Duboscq-Soleil-Pellin, dating from the late nineteenth century, and it seems likely that Bennett would have used the earlier of these. The modern physical explanation of rotary polarization by organic molecules had to await the work undertaken during the second decade of the twentieth century. Literature: Biographical information about Bennett from DNB IV (1885), McKendrick (1875a) and (1875b). For his circle, see Lonsdale (1868). For the background to histology, and microscopy in medicine, see Reiser (1978), 69-90 and Bracegirdle (1977) and (1978). For the history of the polarimeter in diagnostic medicine, see Davis and Merzbach (1994). CATALOGUE OF THE ITEMS INCLUDED IN THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS OF SCOTLAND EXHIBITION AT THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF EDINBURGH, 27 SEPTEMBER 1995. 1. Handbill for Bennett’s Second Course of Lectures on Histology, 1842 Bennett returned to Edinburgh from the Continent in 1841, and in November he began his pioneering lecture course on the use of the microscope in medical studies, of which the first lecture was published as a pamphlet that year. Subsequently an amended version appeared in the Lancet. This printed handbill, dated 2nd May 1842, is advertising Bennett’s second course of lectures on histology at 16 Pitt Street, Edinburgh, and his private course on practical manipulation of the microscope. Bennett states that ‘These lectures will be illustrated by numerous preparations, diagrams, and demonstrations under the microscope; the latter by means of twelve achromatic instruments of great power, manufactured by Chevalier of Paris expressly for this course.’ Unfortunately, none of these instruments appear to have survived. JOHN HUGHES BENNETT 3 Source: Department of Physiology, University of Edinburgh: on loan to the National Museums of Scotland. Literature: Bennett (1841); review of ibid., in Anon. (1841); Bennett (1845). Exhibited in Anderson and Simpson (1976), item 357. For Chevalier, see Brenni (1993). 2. Student microscope: G. Oberhaeuser et E. Hartnack, Paris, c. 1860 The Bavarian-born Parisian microscope maker Georges Oberhaeuser reintroduced a version of the drum microscope in 1835, which he patented in 1837. The pattern shown evolved from this, and using achromatic lenses, it became established amongst continental microscope makers for the rest of the century as a fairly cheap and simple type of instrument, well within the reach of the student pocket. As such, it was recommended by Bennett as ‘an excellent microscope ... by Oberhaeuser, with two objectives ..., two eyepieces, ... a neat box with all the accessories necessary (with the exception of a micrometer, which had better be English) ... will cost in Edinburgh, after payment of carriage and duty, about seven guineas.’ Oberhaeuser took his nephew Edmund Hartnack into business in 1857, and retired in 1860. That year, the total number of microscopes manufactured in Europe may have reached 2000. Source: National Museums of Scotland, purchased. Literature: Bennett (1858), 61-70; for Oberhaeuser, see Harting (1866), III, 148-156 and Otto (1970); for the development of the Continental microscope stand, see Nias (1893). Microscope production is discussed by Nuttall (1979), 55. 3. Pocket achromatic microscope: Brunner à Paris, c.1846 While in Paris, Bennett attended a private course of lectures on the use of the achromatic microscope with Dr David Gruby of Vienna. This pocket microscope, designed by Gruby, cost £6, and belonged to Bennett. He denigrated British-made microscopes as ‘cumbrous machines’ and ‘a mass of brasswork and screws’. As Editor of the medical journal in which this instrument was first described in 1846, he commented: ‘We have had one of those instruments in our possession upwards of a month, and have found it exceedingly convenient in visiting patients, and in making post-mortem examinations at private houses.’ Source: Department of Physiology, University of Edinburgh: on loan to the National Museums of Scotland. Literature: Gruby (1846); Bennett (1858),

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